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Introduction to Linux - A Hands on Guide

This guide was created as an overview of the Linux Operating System, geared toward new users as an exploration tour and getting started guide, with exercises at the end of each chapter.
For more advanced trainees it can be a desktop reference, and a collection of the base knowledge needed to proceed with system and network administration. This book contains many real life examples derived from the author's experience as a Linux system and network administrator, trainer and consultant. They hope these examples will help you to get a better understanding of the Linux system and that you feel encouraged to try out things on your own.

SUSE 10.0 felt slow to me, so I was ready to try something new. Lo and behold, SUSE 10.1 appeared just weeks after I installed 10.0

I decided to go ahead with the network install, just like I had with 10.0. Finding a fast mirror was difficult but mirrors.kernel.org delivered a decent speed for me.

When I installed SUSE 10.0, it was incompatible with my nForce 4 SLI-based ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe mainboard in that it would hang at loading sata_nv. Disabling APIC in the BIOS fixed this. This time around with 10.1, I decided to leave APIC on just to see what would happen.

Alas, to my surprise, the SUSE 10.1 installer booted without a single hesitation (IRQ lockup, sata_nv freeze, mouse freeze, or otherwise). Installation was very straightforward. I had a previous install of 10.0 but I decided to wipe it and do a New Installation of 10.1 after backing up my documents. I marked the / partition for ReiserFS format, and enabled swap on my same old swap partition. The /boot partition I decided not to format because I put my backups on that oversized partition.

One thing I noticed was that 'refreshing packages' took what seemed a decent five minutes, and this popped up at least three times during the installation whenever I changed the partitioning or packaging configuration. For packages, I decided to install a minimal default of GNOME and help/support. It even asked me if I wanted to configure the firewall to allow VNC/remote desktop, and I indeed did want to.

The installation proceeded, and it downloaded everything I needed in a mere hour and a half on a Comcast 6 Mbps Internet connection. After completion it wanted to reboot and go to the second stage of installation. Then, it searched for drivers with a dialog reminscent of a Windows 98 driver search. It found drivers for all of the devices except my "ATI TV Wonder USB 2.0", which has only so far been detected in Fedora Core 2 32-bit for me.

But there's a dark side to every story. I went to configure my NVIDIA 7800GT graphics with SaX2, and the screen became completely garbled. After a while I tried going to the virtual terminals,Ctrl-Alt-Backspace, Ctrl-Alt-Delete repeatedly. The thing was frozen. @#%!

Thankfully, that was when the installation was on the last step (driver install), so I pressed the reset button. Then, SUSE Linux 10.1 proceeded to boot, and I decided to scour the X config before entering gdm. Looked fine, so I started gdm and I was taken to the login I always knew and loved. From there on, entering my username/password took me to a radically different-looking desktop from my SUSE 10.0. The task bar was now at the bottom, and the icons seemed a lot different. It had a more plastic feel to it as well. They opted for a blue background this time around.

My next endeavour was to get Xgl working. This article made it easy: Xgl on SUSE 10.1 for Gnome and KDE with NVidia Graphics Cards. Before I knew it, I was up and running Xgl without any errors, the first time around.

After installing MP3 support, enabling the built-in GNOME Weather applet, getting mplayer and mplayer-plugin to work, and installing Adobe Reader, I felt I was all set to enjoy SUSE Linux 10.1. My mouse-wheel worked automatically this time as well. Not to mention, the whole system seems a lot faster. I'm very happy with SUSE Linux 10.1. The only problem I have had is that the "software installer" reports a corrupt SQLite database, but I have posted about the problem on various SUSE forums and filed a bug for it, so hopefully that will get fixed. Overall, very impressed. I definitely recommend this to anyone, over any other distribution I've ever tried in my life.

I have used SuSE since its 9.1 release and have generally found it to be a very full-featured and robust operating system but tended to be a little bloated and not as fast as it could be. SuSE 10.1 continues that tradition in spades.

INSTALL: The install is typical SuSE, with the YaST installer detecting the hardware on this pretty new rig perfectly. I chose to install the 64-bit version, and did so from the 5 CD set that was originally available at the launch date (DVDs are now available today, May 19th.) About 30 minutes later, I have the stock KDE system ready to go. I let YaST see the addon CD, which took a couple of minutes to scan and add. The CDs were about twice as slow as installing 10.0 from DVD due to the lower read speed on the CDs and the fact that I have to shuffle them around.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS: The default theme and fonts are SO much better than in 10.0 or 9.x. It is actually very pretty now and the fonts are appropriate size. The speed and responsiveness are typical for SuSE, maybe a hair faster than in 10.0, and a lot better than in the 9.x series. But it's a bit slower than Ubuntu and a LOT less zippy than Gentoo, which I ran from a Live CD in RAM. My monitor is running at 1280x1024 even though I told YaST's SaX tool to set it at 1600x1200, but that is a known-to-me bug with my choice of running my monitor over DVI with my card. (Analog RGB input to my monitor from my GPU lets me do 1600x1200 out of the box, but it's not as sharp.) The NVIDIA drivers from NVIDIA's website fix this and I'm at 1600x1200. I set up XGL per the instructions on Novell's website and XGL has limited features but works. Transparencies don't work, but the resize, window effects, and the cube and zoom work. I'm impressed. The ZMD update tool pops up and wants me to update, but it took roughly 20 minutes to process even the update lists, frequently pegging both cores at 100%. It appears to hang once the list comes up and I select "update," but I can see that the computer is downloading data and the tool finishes the updates without giving any indication that it is even working.

OVERALL IMPRESSIONS: After running the OS for a week, I can say that it is very stable and is easier on the RAM than SuSE 10.0 was, even though XGL is running in 10.1 and wasn't on 10.0. It's a little snappier than 10.0, but it basically represents a very polished-up 10.0 with a little better memory management and a cool new GUI option with XGL. After using ZMD a bit, it seems to be more set up to be a centralized patch management/deployment system rather than a single-computer system. It would excel in the corporate arena, which is where I think that Novell really wants this OS and its derivative, SUSE Enterprise Desktop 10, to be. Maybe Novell/OpenSUSE will tweak ZMD to work better in 10.2- if they get that done and make the OS a little more sprightly then it would be about perfect.

I have been using Suse Linux for several years. I upgraded to version 10.1 as soon as it was available. I installed from DVD with no problems.

The only complaint I have is I have not been able to get either my laser of HP photo printer to work. They would not work under version 10.0 either. I need to take time to download the proper drivers, etc. I had tried to do this under version 10 but that version could not seem to compile anything to an executable program. I do not have the same problem with 10.1. This was the main reason I upgraded.

The new program to install and update Linux programs seems slower then YaST. It does do the job without any input though. I have gotten into the habit of installing using Ksetup.

Overall, Suse 10.1 seems to be very stable and usable. I would completely dump Windows XP if I could get a program to view encrypted DVDs under Linux. I found a program that shows DVDs but was unable to install it under the last version due to not being able to compile anything. I will try again under this version.

Would you recommend the product? no | Price you paid?: None indicated | Rating: 3

Pros:

none, things stopped working

Cons:

installer problems, dependency problems, video issues

well, 10.1 is a complete waiste of time for me. I spent more time trying to config this on 3 systems, the installer buggy. the screen fonts look horrible, while all other tried distro's work with the nvidia card. suse, does not seem to know how to handle my basic 64mb nvidia card. SLOW SLOW SLOW, yes did I say it was slow. Took over 45 mins to install only to be corrupted , when attempting updates, I got dependency problems, well wtf, this is a new install from trust repos, so why would I get depend errors on a new install.

Printer, well that is a night mare, it worked after an hour of playing with the installer. Then you hope that your internet connection works is a another problem.

Bottom line, if it takes longer to install a Linux distro then windows, and is buggier then windows, stay with windows, or go with mepis or fedora

I upgraded to 10.1 from 10.0 only to find out that the YaST sources are broken. I can not download an RPM to my home directory and install from there. Also you need to jump through too many hoops to get the online update working if you do not configure your network during system install.

Would you recommend the product? no | Price you paid?: None indicated | Rating: 0

Pros:

New version of KDE

Cons:

Broken YaST Sources

I upgraded to 10.1 from 10.0 only to find out that the YaST sources are broken. I can not download an RPM to my home directory and install from there. Also you need to jump through too many hoops to get the online update working if you do not configure your network during system install.

NO support for encrypted dvds. and still a lack of commercial support.

Suse 10.1 is a major jump from my last try with them, 8.1. and is getting close to being acceptable. but it looks like i will still have to have a dual boot system. Of the things I am intereted in. Kino dv prog still laggs beihind even the free software under windows as does a lot of other things. And as for playing commercial dvds well? but this time I am going to persevere just because I need the change but i will let you know in three months if it last?

Would you recommend the product? no | Price you paid?: None indicated | Rating: 1

Pros:

1

Cons:

1

I am running SuSE 10.(laugh) behind a router. I have downloaded and run SuSE 9.x up to 10.0 with no problem. When I install 10.1, I CANNOT connect to the Internet, regardless of how many times I change my network settings, insert DNS Server ID's., etc. It's a joke.....SuSE 10.1 is sad....really, really, is....Kubuntu 6 works and finds my network right out of the box; as does CentOS 4.3, PCLinuxOS, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD. OpenBSD???? The MOST secure desktop there is finds my network behind a router but "SuSE" can't do it? Jeez........I can't wait to post...I really can't....what a joke....no wonder it's "free."

Slower than slack, Can't get to the dvdrom, everything is adjusted so as not to play risky materials

I recently bought a amd64 x2 with a shuttle case that comes with a micro board run by nvidia chipset. After much problems with Slack and Debian I decided to give Suse a whirl again.

The install worked fine. Saw all of my components. Did not install components I did not have. Very flexible as far as letting me install custom modules. Everything worked beautifully. Even recognized the super sound system in my machine.

So after everything is installed I go to play an avi file off of my NAS device. There is no xine. I install xine which requires my installation dvd. Once Xine is installed Xine tells me that it has been modified so it won't play risky materials. Evidentally AVI are risky materials. Well I decide to pop in a cd full of MP3. Ummmm where is my cdrom? There is no reference any where to the cdrom or dvdrom for that matter. After searching for a way to get it working I give up.

So the good thing is Suse10.1 works right out of the box. Bad thing is if your wanting to do something extreme like watching anime shows from AVI too bad. I am sure there is a patch for this. But then again I am sure there is a linux system that allows it out of the box.

I have been using SuSE for a number of years, since version 7.x - I think. Upgraded from 10.0 to 10.1 using the dvd from Novell. Everything went fine. The online update worked, but the ZENworks updater did not do it for me; so I am using Smart Package Manager rather than the zenworks.

10.1 does not seem any faster to me than 10.0, and I don't much care for the splash screen. It looks to me like something designed to leave one with a blah feeling.

Upon installing this product, the installer went extremely slowly from page to page (i think yast kept refreshing itself). However, once it was up and running, nothing went wrong except for the fact that it froze 2 times. It's got tons of free software that you wouldn't believe existed.

The only gripe I have about this distro is that it's a HUGE memory hog, worse than windows xp. This thing will consume from 250MB-314MB of RAM & the computer running it only had 320MB. Be aware if you install this on low memory machines or it will be swapping to the hard drive constantly.

I lost the American/Spanish flag (from the 9.3 and 10.0) to switch keyboard layouts

I lost the capability to switch between (American and Spanish) languages with one single click -and what is worst, I do not know how to get it back. Besides this only lost in my SuSE 10.1, I have gained a top of the line linux flavor -I think.

Would you recommend the product? no | Price you paid?: None indicated | Rating: 5

Pros:

Strong community always ready to answer questions

Cons:

System management crippled to the point of rendering the distro useless

I'm giving 5 (Good) for the effort, 1 (Poor) for the overall performance.

Suffice it to say that I ditched the 10.1 the very moment SLED 10 (RC 3) came out... no issues, IT JUST WORKS!

Now that SLED 10 is GA, it is a no-brainer for every SUSEr to choose the best distro of'em all: SLED! It is like 10.1 without the errors, omissions and quirks.

Folks, go for SLED!

The mighty adventurous will choose SLES instead.

SUSE Linux Entreprise Server Release 10, or SLES 10 for short: this one is going to be the choice distro of the professionals. For the Joe Linux who just wants to stay in contact with his pals, who just wants to do his surfing, office'ing, and probably developing of software the SLES 10 might be an overkill. You don't need a server if you want to do your daily chores or write great programs.

Would you recommend the product? no | Price you paid?: None indicated | Rating: 3

Pros:

Latest and greatest of everything

Cons:

Too many things broken

I've been a faithful SuSE user since their 4.? but 10.1 makes me wonder if I should change. I installed 10.1 on 3 machines, a 64 bit machine, a 32 bit machine (both of them AMD with NVidia video) and a Dell Inspiron 8000 laptop. The install went reasonably well on all of them. Network update didn't work on any of them. Then came all the surprises.

The 32 bit machine has a motherboard chipset that supports only UHCI USB - according to the log the kernel realises it. When a USB stick is plugged in, however, it fires up the EHCI driver, which then locks up and the USB is gone until reboot. The 64 bit machine has a quite new NVidia motherboard chipset. On that one the on-board Ethernet controller is detected and initialised but after a few packets it locks up and there's no traffic in any direction any more until reboot. (the HW is OK on both cases - it's been tested) On the laptop the ATI Mobile video is recognised but the 3D acceleration does not work - even though it used to work perfectly under 9.x and 10.0.

Neither machine runs KDE or GNOME, they have FVWM and that is it. Therefore, the automatic mounting of media (like USB sticks) that was finally working pretty well in 10.0 is a very nice feature. However, that has been removed in the 10.1 version - the new version assumes that your desktop manager takes care of the actual mounting/umounting. Which, if you do not run a desktop manager, is of course not happening.

If you want to run legacy application which are not available in source form, you may be out of luck with 10.1. There is no support for running anything that relies on older glibc versions. Forget about the LD_ASSUME_KERNEL. Issuing that will render even the most basic commands unoperable. Thus, a handful of commercial games cease to operate as well as other commercial software: for example StarOffice 6.0 crashes immediately. Actually, you may be in trouble even if you have the source, due to changes in the threading model. SuSE used to be reasonably backward compatible, so if that is important to you, you may not want to get 10.1. Chances are that your legacy apps won't run. Oh, there is a package on the DVD that *supposed* to let you run older application (according to the package description). Unfortunately, this description is the content of the package and nothing else. There are exactly 0 bytes extracted from the package when you install it.

Also, it is fairly slow. Opera 8 loads in about 5 seconds on a machine with a 50MB/s disc, 2G RAM and a 3200+ AMD CPU; OOo 2 takes about as much time as the *slow* OOo 1 used to take on a machine with half the speed.

On the good side, the packages that are there are the latest and mostly working.

So, if you want the latest stuff, go for it. However, if you want something that works like the previous version only better, faster and bugs fixed, my advice would be to steer away from 10.1.

Must admit l am very new to linux , have read alot but never taken the plunge.
Well that has now change , l am running suse 10.1 as a dual boot system with windows xp pro.
Its early days yet but the install was painless and l had no problems with suse finding my hardware .
All in all l am pretty happy .... but how do you add programs ? I cannot find a exec or install file on anything l download ( old window habits ) , so any advice or help.

I decided to install SuSE 10.1 as a the next distribution of linux in my "tour de distro." I like the concepts behind SuSE; ease of use and graphical design. One may never truly need to use the lackluster command-line console in SuSE. Unfortunately, that was a turn off for me. Being a true Slackie at heart, I found that it took much longer to do certain things in SuSE that could have been done in seconds using Slackware. The most painfully obvious was package installation. YaST is terribly slow on my PIII 1000 MHz machine with 320 MB of RAM. It takes a bare minimum of 10 minutes to install ANYTHING. Since I was so used to simply pulling up a console and typing "installpkg ____" or "upgradepkg ___," this slow process sort of sucked. On the other hand, YaST really struck me as an excellent idea, if not poorly executed. It's like one-stop shopping for all your computer's needs, right there in front of you. It can even be used in command-line mode in a user-interface similar to Midnight Commander.

All and all, here is my conclusion:

Operation speed sacrificed for graphical interface and ease of use. Still, an excellent stepping stone for closing the gap between Windows (ease of use) and Linux (stability and computing power), but SuSE still has a ways to go before I will consider it "the" linux distro.

Would you recommend the product? no | Price you paid?: None indicated | Rating: 3

Pros:

Good looking boot loader

Cons:

See below

I bought the retail version of 10.1. I've been using eX Pee / Suse 10.0 and liked Suse 10.0 so much that I had to try 10.1... BIG mistake!!! It took 2 days for me to get the half assed yast updater working and I cant get my nvidia 3d card working. Now I'm triple booting eX Pee / 10.0 / 10.1 just so I can use 3d on 10.0. I'm going to be takeing 10.1 off of my box because it just consumes space. I'll think it through a little better before I buy anything else from Suse.

The system cleverly jumped over my core5 install (with some hinting) and proceeded directly to my second drive (Sata).

I am pleased with the install process, except that I wanted to chose the keyboard layout before proceeding. The install operation is proceeding as I write this, and if I cannot make keyboard changes, or boot the system, then I will be back to the web for help.

After 15 years with whine Doze i decided on something new. Tried a suse live cd and liked it. Downloaded suse 10.1 thru' P2P burned on DVD. Installation quite straight forward except i wanted to install the Gnome environment (don't know why, i just liked the name) but it could not complete installation. Gave up on Gnome and chose KDE which completed my installation. Suprisingly similar to windows on GUI and most of my hardware installed without hiccups. Even my new sonyericsson phone which was a pain to install in windows is immediately installed.
Only thing is my lexmark printer is not supported under suse but i'm still dual booting and only slightly inconconvinient to print. I can honestly say i like what i'm using now and don't miss windows the least despite not quite having a hang on installing from source but the freedom from having to worry about antivirus and malware makes everything worthwhile.
If you would like to migrate from windows then suse 10.1 is the way to go.

Would you recommend the product? no | Price you paid?: None indicated | Rating: 2

Pros:

Cons:

slow, buggy

I've been using Suse since 8.x and until 10.1, I've been reasonably satisfied. I am now seriously considering installing another distro.
My computer houses a Pentium 4 / Celeron CPU with a very fast clock speed and loads of DDRAM but still the program takes forever to boot up. The update function doesn't work at all and for me, worse is the fact that after agreeing initially to use the new update it erased all of my oringinal ftp sites for updates.
Although a major pain, I was able to find and install the Xine and codecs to be able to play commercial DVD's in each release over the years until now. I have spent hours and still can't manage to find and install the necessary combination of files to get the player(s) to work..
Even the sound is major headache and I have given up trying to configure and/or tweek the player(s) to play my CD's..
All in all, 10.1 has been a major disappointment for me and I wouldn't recommend it at all.
drmjh:confused:

Would you recommend the product? no | Price you paid?: None indicated | Rating: 5

Pros:

Faster than 10.0

Cons:

Yast very SLOW. Runs badly on some pc's. Too quickly released

Used to Suse from release 8.0. Moved over smoothly to 8.1, 9.0, 9.2, 10.0. Because 10.0 gave me some trouble in the beginning, I did not install it on my friends pc with 9.2. But as 9.2 will be outdated soon, I decided to plunge in with 10.1.
First on my own pc with 10.0. Installation went smoothly, it did regard/protect all the 'dangerous' stuff I had installed like libdvdcss, which 10.0 had thrown away.
It took several hours though. 8.0 had convinced me because that was installed in just half an hour and had recognized almost all my hardware. I ended in a looping when I installed all the security-updates for 10.1. Yast was among them an so decided after downloading and installing all there was, to restart this process. It took some clever(?) clicking in Yast to escape from this. But then, there it was, and it had even restored the splashscreens for Grub, that I had been missing since moving from Lilo to Grub.

Running 10.1 worked out ok. Of course, I had to reconfigure the sound card, as usual. And the ZEN-updater is a relief in comparison to the Yast-version. As it can add you as a trusted user for this, you don't have to give it a root password, as Yast likes to have. But installing downloaded software? It looks that's no option anymore. At least Yast wants its stuff only from the DVD/CD or the Suse-sites. KDE has a neat function, to add your download directory or whatever as a new Yast-source, and to install any rpm you click on with Yast. Both are useless features now.
I tried to give Yast a new source via the ZEN-installer. Now I could use my download-directory? No. It did not appear in Yast. And No, the Suse-site for security fixes had disappeared from ZEN, although I had not touched that. Thank you very much for this bug. So, I gave Yast again an hour or so to re-add one of those sites as update-site. That is really unbelievable s l o w.
Now I don't bother anymore, there are more ways to Rome, but I think that Novell seriously has to rethink these things over.
Just a minor nuissance was, that my beloved showFoto was missing from the 'Open with' menu in Konqueror. It had been there in 10.0! I don't know any program that is more user-friendly and powerfull for editing pictures. So I had to figure out how to get it back, and learned in this course that it is part of Digikam, and that is was installed, but not associated to jpg and jpeg.
All in all, 10.1 works on my pc, but not without much tweaking.

I installed it on my friends pc, and used my new knowledge. So this one was less troublesome, I thought.
But to make a long story short, It took me 3 full days trying to install the sound card, and eventually gave up. Yes, it does produce sound, and yes, it does so with two very different soundcards, but no, it does not perform AT ALL after this. It cripples. It does not matter how the IRQ's and I/O's and DMA's are arranged. It does NOT PERFORM, it's unworkable. Start a program, wait 10 minutes, then you see it is busy with, well, starting... Remove the soundcard, and it runs.
Just big shit.
So, I downgraded this originally 9.2 pc from 10.1 to 10.0. I expected problems with the soundcard. I got: a fast running sounding and unproblematic Suse 10.0 and a happy friend. Don't tell me it's the hardware! It's Suse 10.1 That sucks.

Sorry for this, I used to love Suse, but maybe I have to rethink my opinion about Novell-Suse.

Like most people, I was not able to install rpms through yast which didnt have the dependencies rpm existing on the system or in the installation source

Earlier using FC4/5. Switched to OpenSuse10.1. Installations from both the hard drive and NFS was easy. In fact seems to be better than either of two earlier installs. As far as installing not so common rpms, I think is a pain. Though I must admit this is my first stint as using Linux as main OS. I dont know is th YaST links are broken or not, but adding services which contain the catalog information for Opensuse10.1 is a wild goose chase. Apart from my HDD I have two other http services in the installation source to help me find rpm that I need. Though they were also not able to get me rpms like BitTorrent and resolve package dependencies on their own, like "yum" does. If anyone has some suggestions, most welcome. I want to totally get away from Windows from my other partition and keep, one of the linux distro on my laptop. Advise if opensuse is the right choice.
To start with playing MP3s was difficult and thankfully got the updated xmms-lib and I was on my way to listen my music. Then other issue was that of Broadcom WLAN card. USed NDISwrapper and was online in approx 1-2hrs. of r&d. This is my second week after I installed opensuse, I think I am on my way to removing Windows XP partition.

stability, ease of use, nice set of working IDEs and compilers, advanced GUI,avalanche of priceless networking tools and related packages, excellent power management on notebooks, A HACKERS PARADISE

Cons:

Broken zen updater but Smart works even better, Power hungry

openSUSE 10.1 will always be the OS of chioce for me. Coming from SuSE 9.1 Personal, i consider this a major working upgrade and am happy to say i have no problems at all with this magnificent OS.

I give credit to Novell for such computing enhancement expecially with regard to applications development and notebook power management. All my development tools work out of the box and finally gcc compiles a source file to an executable all the time.

I could'nt be happier with an OS and have completely dumped Windows with this efective replacement from Novell.
Never felt so free and powerful with an OS as i do with openSUSE 10.1.

Stable, Easy Install. Works very well out of the box. Set up of programs is easy. KDE looks great. lots of repositories. Sax2 is great.

Cons:

Extremely Slow Boot. YaST can be a pain.

I installed the non-OSS version of SuSE 10.1 and was immediately impressed. A lot of the programs that I use were already installed "out of the box." The distro is easy to use for the newbie. Unlike some distros, setup on my Nvidia 6800GS graphics card was easy. Note to Nvidia users: You'll want to skip the hardware configuration at the end of the installation. It will install drivers for your Nvidia card that do not work. I skipped the configuration. I loaded the Nvidia drivers from the Nvidia repository. I then configured the X.org server to work with the new drivers using the Sax2 configuration utility, which is awesome. Also, if you skip the hardware configuration, you'll have to install your sound card and printer manually, but this is a snap with YaST.

The only problems that I noticed with SuSE 10.1 is that it boots painfully slow and I do get the occasional crash with YaST.

==DETAILED CONS==
*Too many CDs. Five in all, and you only need the first three for installation.
*S-L-O-W installation
*S-L-O-W installation of software
*Wrestled to get mp3 support (won't even attempt to mess with DVDs)
*Yast has been the most difficult update/install utility I have ever messed with. I'd rather use terminal yum.
*Remember I said somewhat customizable. Its kinda limited, or just plain difficult to customize.

Overall its an okay operating system, but I don't recommend it at all for beginners to Linux. For people starting out with Linux I'll continue to point them to Ubuntu or Kubuntu. Maybe if other software management tools could learn from Synaptic Package Management or Adept, that would be nice. Who knows though? Maybe its just me (and that's more than likely).

I am actually very surprised to here all the problems with this OS. I started my linux experience with a crappy version called topolino-something. Didn't work. I then stumbled across SUSE 10.1 (unstable) and got it up and running on a fairly uncommon laptop
Sony PCG-GRX560. And just about everyhting worked. New HP printer/scanners audio/MP3 video/DVD. It could be slow at times and even slower other times. And there were lots of bugs in the unstable version. I have the released version and all the bugs that were there have been eradicated, and it seems to run a bit faster. Nevertheless I am a complete novice with Linux but have found a safe haven for me to use the stability of linux easily in SUSE 10.1.

Would you recommend the product? no | Price you paid?: None indicated | Rating: 4

Pros:

Mainly stable and reliable

Cons:

Beagle, ZMD and other Novell additions

I have been with Suse since 7.0 and 9.2 seemed to me to be the high point of my experience. A fundamental screw-up (my fault) with the 9.2 installation prompted me to "upgrade" to 10.1. At first I was quite impressed. The install was fine and hardware recognition no problem (I don't have anything very exotic). Between SUSE and KDE pluggable drives seemed to work better than previously (although if you have more than one user logged in to different virtual terminals, both get asked what they want to do with new media mounted - a lot of inserting and removing of usb drives and CD quickly piles up a lot of unsanswered dialogs in the VT which is not actually being used).

What did drive me to distraction and has convinved me to change to another distro sometime very soon were the following "features":

1. Beagle - document indexing system or some such. Seems to be enabled by default and took over 80% of my CPU at random time, presumably looking through my documents to index them. I did not ask it to do this so why was it doing it? I eventually found a way to turn this off.

2. ZMD. Seems to be an alternative to YAST2 for package management but is installed along with YAST, so you can in theory use either. The YAST implemention seems to be partly broken however and won't do some jobs, whereas the ZMD (like beagle above) starts itself up randomly and uses even more CPU cycles presumably to look through all my packages and keep me up to date. I eventually found a way of disabling this as well but had to install a 3rd party solution (SMART - now that really looks like a neat tool) to actually handle my pacakge updates etc at a time of my chosing.

3. Very minor - but seems to show the way things are going with this distro. My firefox home page points at my favourite website. If I press the Home button it goes there. If I close down Firefox and start it up again, guess what open - the Novell/Suse website. This seems to be the result of a recent on-line update.

What I am saying is that with Suse 10.1 I feel I am losing control and Suse is assuming more control. Might suit some users who will regard it as "clever" and "slick" but it just annoys me.